I now think of software code as DNA.

Your machinery was not written elegantly. It was sloppily assembled via evolutionary pressures.

A gene gets duplicated, mutates, and suddenly you have new functionality and new fitness criteria.

Try something bad and you die without reproduction.

Our code isn't clean. There's redundancy and extra packing and slop all over the human body.

Embrace it. Stochastically hill climb.

Code is DNA. Evolve it, don't intelligently design it. Fit the curves of your environment quickly and use tests to cull bad behavior and the slopes of your domain.